her sister states.

I will not be taken as a carping critic if I point out the difficulties
in its progress on the basis of Australasian experience. It may, as did
the Australasian acts, have a period of apparent success, and the
workers benefit by an initial service in planing out the worst
injustices. So far as I can see today, there is no reason why it will
not run the same course as in Australia, where the amount of strikes and
dislocation was ultimately as great under these laws as in countries
without them. In periods of industrial prosperity, the advancing wage
usually adjudicated by the industrial courts prevents strikes, but in
times of industrial depression decisions against the work people give
rise to the old form of resistance.

No one denies the right of the individual to cease work. The question
involved in this form of legislation is the right to combination in
common action by strike. Whatever the right may be, it is a certainty
that the working community of the civilized world adheres to this right
as an absolute fundamental to their protection. They believe that the
aggregation of capital into large units under single control places them
at an entire disadvantage if they cannot threaten to use their ultimate
weapon of combined cessation of labor. While it may be argued that the
State may intervene in such a manner as to substitute the protection of
justice for the right of strike and lockout, the belief in the right to
strike has become imbedded in the minds of the laboring community of the
world to an extent that it will not receive with confidence any
alternative in driving its own bargains.

There are other difficulties in compulsory adjudication of disputes. The
workings of such law necessarily result in ultimate determination of
minimum wage for all crafts and industries. Every different industrial
unit will claim a different minimum based upon its local economic
surroundings. Otherwise the competitive basis upon which industry is
established will be undermined. No court has ever yet adequately solved
these differentials and some dislocation of industry results. I would
expect to see develop out of this type of minimum wage the same
phenomenon that existed in some parts of Australia, where certificates
of inability to earn the minimum, and therefore permission to undertake
employment at less than this wage had to be issued in order that
employment might be found for the aged and disabled. The